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A review by fleshemoji
Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum
4.0
So I had this notion that alternating fiction/non-fiction titles would help avoid my non-fiction binge-to-burnout cycle, but in a minute we'll see how that didn't really work out :D
I picked this up in the same spirit as I did [b:Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup|37976541|Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup|John Carreyrou|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1523311515l/37976541._SX50_.jpg|59699437] (about Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos start-up) and [b:Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty|43868109|Empire of Pain The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty|Patrick Radden Keefe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611952534l/43868109._SY75_.jpg|68254444] (about the Sackler family and their drug OxyContin, a catalyst drug to the opioid crisis), namely to learn about something that had very bad intentions/consequences and that I didn't know much about to begin with. With Money Men, however, I went in not even aware of what Wirecard was.
In this sense, McCrum does a great job of walking you through all of that if Wirecard is a completely new name to you too. I found the subject perhaps a bit more forbidding than I expected, mostly because I am no economist and the more you read about money under capitalism, the less it feels it has anything to do with real money as any layperson would understand it, and the more it becomes fuzzy entities like "assets" and "stocks". It was partly that inability to really know for sure I understand how global money fraud is committed, even at the end of all of this, that brought this down to a 4 (and no, I don't mean why wasn't this a blueprint to financial crime, I just mean I am not certain off the top of my head I could adequately explain how Wirecard did it, even though I understood how some of the schemes they were running were managing it). It seems ridiculous to me (as an average person and not a financial entity) to imagine that you can just essentially magic money on paper that translates into basically thin air in reality, and no one would ever figure you out (including audits by big legal powerhouses such as Ernst and Young and KMPG), but that seems to be exactly what happened here. You'd imagine a big financial crash would have taught capitalism a thing or two but well, you'd be wrong.
What I found McCrum less accomplished in is really following his own investigative threads through. There were plenty of details brought up that didn't really seem to ever be followed through, or even brought to some resolution of the type "the trail went nowhere", while other, frankly uninteresting discoveries get pages-worth of attention. Perhaps this was also a bit harder to really get invested in, as all the crimes really were so opaque to the average person who still saves money in a savings account, and to whom all these high-stakes schemes are best summed up as "rich people are the worst"; this is not the same as in the previous two titles mentioned, where the real damage is felt by oftentimes poor, desperate people- the kinds of people that would get blamed for what's happened to them and left out of a solution as well, even when the crime is known (I mean, the Sacklers still get to be a name largely associated with philanthropic endeavours, never mind the thousands whose lives were waylaid by opioid-graduating-to-fentanyl addictions, with no support or understanding at all).
All in all, not a completely inaccessible book about a financial start-up, but just not quite able to grab me all the way through.
I picked this up in the same spirit as I did [b:Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup|37976541|Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup|John Carreyrou|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1523311515l/37976541._SX50_.jpg|59699437] (about Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos start-up) and [b:Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty|43868109|Empire of Pain The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty|Patrick Radden Keefe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611952534l/43868109._SY75_.jpg|68254444] (about the Sackler family and their drug OxyContin, a catalyst drug to the opioid crisis), namely to learn about something that had very bad intentions/consequences and that I didn't know much about to begin with. With Money Men, however, I went in not even aware of what Wirecard was.
In this sense, McCrum does a great job of walking you through all of that if Wirecard is a completely new name to you too. I found the subject perhaps a bit more forbidding than I expected, mostly because I am no economist and the more you read about money under capitalism, the less it feels it has anything to do with real money as any layperson would understand it, and the more it becomes fuzzy entities like "assets" and "stocks". It was partly that inability to really know for sure I understand how global money fraud is committed, even at the end of all of this, that brought this down to a 4 (and no, I don't mean why wasn't this a blueprint to financial crime, I just mean I am not certain off the top of my head I could adequately explain how Wirecard did it, even though I understood how some of the schemes they were running were managing it). It seems ridiculous to me (as an average person and not a financial entity) to imagine that you can just essentially magic money on paper that translates into basically thin air in reality, and no one would ever figure you out (including audits by big legal powerhouses such as Ernst and Young and KMPG), but that seems to be exactly what happened here. You'd imagine a big financial crash would have taught capitalism a thing or two but well, you'd be wrong.
What I found McCrum less accomplished in is really following his own investigative threads through. There were plenty of details brought up that didn't really seem to ever be followed through, or even brought to some resolution of the type "the trail went nowhere", while other, frankly uninteresting discoveries get pages-worth of attention. Perhaps this was also a bit harder to really get invested in, as all the crimes really were so opaque to the average person who still saves money in a savings account, and to whom all these high-stakes schemes are best summed up as "rich people are the worst"; this is not the same as in the previous two titles mentioned, where the real damage is felt by oftentimes poor, desperate people- the kinds of people that would get blamed for what's happened to them and left out of a solution as well, even when the crime is known (I mean, the Sacklers still get to be a name largely associated with philanthropic endeavours, never mind the thousands whose lives were waylaid by opioid-graduating-to-fentanyl addictions, with no support or understanding at all).
All in all, not a completely inaccessible book about a financial start-up, but just not quite able to grab me all the way through.